THE TELEGRAPH: The next election - both here and in the US - is shaping up to be a referendum on free market economics. All those old anti-capitalist diatribes are being resuscitated with triumphal delight by the side that definitively lost the great political argument of the last century.
The Tories will not just be running against Labour and its current leadership. They will be running against a reinvigorated soft Marxist ideology which will infect the news coverage and analysis, against those who are saying: "You see, this is what comes from allowing the economic fate of the people to be determined by the market: ruin and instability followed by the inevitable need for government intervention. Greed and personal irresponsibility have been permitted to run rampant and the free market has now been utterly discredited."
And here, they chortle, is the ultimate irony: even the United States, the most militantly capitalist society in the world, is being forced to resort to massive state intervention - nationalising debt, of all things - to avoid a banking collapse. The game is up. Big government is vindicated. As Gordon Brown put it in his speech to the Labour conference, "Those who don't believe in the potential of government shouldn't be trusted to form one." Read that as, "Those of us who believe in the power of the centralised state don't have to apologise any more."
It is going to take considerable strength of nerve and clarity of mind to reject the absurd premise on which this argument is based: to say that capitalism has been fatally compromised by the behaviour of a particular group of irresponsible individuals is like saying that democracy was irretrievably discredited by the fact that Adolph Hitler was once elected to office. I am hugely relieved to see that David Cameron is holding out against this tide.
He is stating unequivocally that the idea that a state takeover of institutions is the only alternative to failures of judgment and incompetence in private finance is both wrong and dangerous.
Banks being run by reckless bankers put the country's private wealth - and its public wealth, since the latter is derived from the former - at stake. But politicians and their appointees are no more infallible than civilian individuals in the soundness of their decisions, and when they screw up they take the wealth of the entire tax-paying nation down with them in one step. Quite apart from the fact that it was the policies of politicians on easy money that permitted the bankers to run amok.
So, all things considered, Mr Cameron must be on the right track with his plan to allow the independent Bank of England to take responsibility for restructuring failing banks as an alternative to nationalisation which would put them under the direct control of government. Financial Crisis: Capitalism Is Under Attack - and Cameron Is Steadfast in Defence >>> By Janet Daley | September 29, 2008
The Dawning of a New Dark Age – Paperback (US) Barnes & Noble >>>
The Dawning of a New Dark Age – Hardcover (US) Barnes & Noble >>>
